Sizing Windows 10 and Windows 7 Virtual Machines

After reviewing all of the scalability tests we conducted over the past few months, I thought it was time to revisit the recommendations for sizing Windows 10 virtual machines. I also reached out to Nick Rintalan to see if this is in line with what is currently being recommended for production environments (if you disagree, blame him 🙂 ).

Density – Experience: For some of the recommendations, there are 2 numbers. The first is if you are more concerned with server density and the second is if you are more concerned with the user experience. What I find curious is if you have a heavy workload, are you as concerned with server density?

PVS RAM Cache: Using the RAM cache will drastically reduce storage IOPS. This will be critical to providing a good user experience and will be taken from the total allocated RAM. The RAM column takes the RAM Cache numbers into account.

Hypervisor: There is no hypervisor identified. Testing showed minor differences between XenServer, Hyper-V and vSphere.